by Juliet Dark
“I’ll bring them to the headwaters,” Lura said.
“That’s near the door to Faerie,” I said. “I’ll walk that far with you.”
“Won’t the Stewarts want to accompany you, seeing as you’re the doorkeeper?”
“I’ll tell them to take Lorelei to the door.”
Lura looked back at her house. The living room floor was under six inches of water. Bits of glass and tin bobbed on the surface. The house groaned and creaked, its timbers cracking under the strain of the water. It didn’t look like it would last till morning, which—I noticed, glancing at the lightening sky in the east—was almost here.
“We have to hurry. I have to be at the door by sunrise.”
Mac and Angus were waiting for us at the edge of the tartan ward. “Lorelei has agreed to go with you,” I told them. “Lura and I are going to walk to the door ourselves.”
“You shouldn’t be alone in the woods right now. We’ve seen strange creatures about.”
“We can take care of ourselves,” Lura said, spitting on the ground.
Angus looked reluctant, but he finally agreed. The other Stewarts had formed a circle around Lorelei. Though a series of hand motions they wove a tartan shawl that they cast over her shoulders. Lorelei adjusted it as she might a mink stole and linked her arm through Angus’s. “Let’s go, boys,” she said, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. She left without a backward glance for her daughter.
“I know,” Lura said as the procession disappeared into the woods. “She’s shallow and flighty, but she’s my mother. I still remember her singing to me when I was small.”
“I think she’s doing the best that she can,” I said. As we took our own path into the woods, I hoped the Stewarts could handle her.
Lura and I followed the Undine into the woods. At first neither of us talked, the rain and the rushing water making it difficult to hear anything we would have said anyway. Then the rain slackened to a drizzle. We walked in slushy silence a while longer, the sound of our boots sucking mud the only noise in the forest.
“Birds are quiet this morning,” Lura commented. “They know something’s wrong.”
A little while later she picked berries from a bush, popped one in her mouth and handed me one. “Bilberry. Good for night vision.”
I put it in my mouth with some trepidation, but it was delicious—and familiar. I recalled the vision I’d shared with Raspberry of the taste of berries and wondered if Lura had fed them to her sister undines. A bit farther on she plucked a red flower from the ground, handed me the flower, and popped the leaves in her mouth. “Red clover leaves are good for my rheumatism, which’ll be acting up after all this rain.” She continued plucking plants from the trees and ground and telling me what they were and what they were good for.
“Where did you learn so much about plants?” I asked.
“My father spent a lot of time in these woods … His mother was a witch. Here, you’d better take this.” She handed me a white-crowned flower and stuck one behind her ear. “Yarrow,” she explained. “Provides magical protection.”
Now that it was lighter I could see into the woods on either side of us. Creatures lurked within the white mist rising from the wet ground: cloven-footed satyrs, slim boys with antlers branching from their heads, small furry creatures with wide flat tails and long sharp teeth …
“Are those …?”
“Zombie beavers,” Lura said. “They’re coming up with the floodwater. We’d better hurry. They’d like nothing better than to eat these eggs—and us.”
We increased our pace but a hundred-year-old woman can go only so fast, even if she is part undine and part witch. The fat, bristly beavers scurried along the ground with surprising speed, gnashing their teeth and chattering back and forth to one another. Lura was chattering to herself as well. I was afraid she’d come unhinged, and who could blame her? The chattering noise itself was enough to drive one mad, let alone the sight of those sharp teeth and long claws. I was already terrified when a huge pine tree crashed to the ground inches in front of us.
“Go over it!” Lura screamed, grabbing my arm and scrambling over the huge tree. “They want us to run into the woods.”
Or they wanted us to get tangled in the pine branches. The sleeve of my rain jacket snagged on a branch. I turned to free it and found myself nose to nose with one of the sharp-toothed predators. It snapped at me, its fangs missing my face by a centimeter as I pulled backward, peeling myself out of my jacket and landing on the ground. I scrambled to my feet and found myself next to Lura, trapped in a small square, hemmed in by downed trees. Teeth-gnashing beavers surrounded us.
Lura knelt and picked up two thick branches that had fallen off the trees and handed me one. She muttered a string of indecipherable words and the ends of both sticks burst into flames. She thrust the burning stick into the beavers’ faces. They fell back, chittering. I swept my stick in a wide arc, singeing the whiskers off two of them. Lura muttered another series of strange words and a forked tongue of lightning split the sky and hit one of the beavers. When they saw their fallen comrade, the rest of the beavers scampered into the woods. Lura muttered a few more words and a sudden downpour extinguished our pine torches. “That should be the end of them for a while. They hate fire.”
I helped Lura climb over a tree. She seemed suddenly frail and worn out, as if using magic had drained her. I offered to carry the bag of eggs, but she refused. “They’re my sisters,” she said.
We walked the rest of the way in silence. When I first met Lura, I’d thought she was a sad, pathetic recluse, but seeing her in these woods where she’d spent her entire life, I realized that she’d had a full life. She knew every inch of these woods and the creatures in it, whether they belonged to this world or Faerie. She’d watched over her sisters as they grew, protecting them against predators and bringing them treats to eat. She might have learned her first magic from her father, but she’d honed her craft in these woods. Looking at Lura and the way she regarded each tree and plant and creature, I saw that she loved the forest.
“Here,” Lura said when we reached a fern-circled clearing. “This is the source of the Undine.” I followed her through the ferns to a large granite boulder and knelt beside her. It was the spring that Soheila, Liz, and Diana had led me to almost a week ago.
Lura sat back on her heels and looked around the glade. “This is where I first met Quincy,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
She parted the ferns growing around the boulder and disclosed a heart carved into the rock with intertwined initials—Q and L—in the same design as the one carved into the bench at Lura’s house. “We met here every day that summer. It’s where he asked me to marry him.”
“It’s a beautiful spot,” I said, admiring once again the spill of water from basin to basin, the wild irises fringing each pool, and the yellow water lilies floating on their surfaces. Weeping willow branches fell in a curtain over one of the pools. It looked like the spot in Faerie where I’d made love to Liam. My own eyes filled with tears at the memory and my heart with an unbearable sense of loss. Liam was really and truly gone. I was glad he hadn’t come back as Duncan, but the fact remained he hadn’t come back at all. It was time to let Liam go once and for all.
As I splashed cold water on my face to wash away the tears, I felt one more coil of the wards dissolve and the beat of my heart, slow and steady. I repeated the words of the spell that bound me to the door. “Quam cor mea aperit, tam ianua aperit.” I could feel my heart beating up against the last cold link of the wards. They were almost all gone. I reached into the water again and met a pair of dark brown eyes. I froze, looking into a man’s face. I sat back on my heels and looked over at Lura. She was also washing her face in the water. With each splash, her skin looked smoother and firmer. She trickled a handful of water over her head and her gray hair turned to gold.
I looked back at the face in the water. Quincy Morris was trapped below the surface studying me. But I wasn�
�t who he was looking for. I reached into my pocket and found the stone I’d stuck in there earlier. The fairy stone, as my father had called it when he gave it to me. It was white with a hole in the middle. I slipped it over my ring finger and, holding my hand above the water, said, simply, “Open.”
Nothing happened. The power inside me writhed, trying to break free, but it still was held in place by the last of the wards. Then I recalled the Aelvestone in my pocket. I took it out and held it over the water. Concentric circles appeared on the surface.
I dropped the stone in the water. The circles spun in a spiral, tunneling deep into the pool, opening up a funnel. Then a head broke the surface and a man rose up from the water. Hearing the disturbance of water, Lura looked up … and gasped.
“Quincy?” she said, all the years since she’d seen her lover falling away from her face like water rolling off a stone.
The dark-haired man—the same one I’d seen on the shores of Faerie—walked toward her, his face radiant. “Lura!” he cried, falling to his knees beside her and gathering her into his arms. “I came here on the morning of our wedding day to pick flowers for you and I fell into the pool. I woke up in a strange place. I’ve been trying ever since to get back to you.” He held her at arms’ length and looked into her face. “I was afraid it would have been too long. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed, but it must not have been any time at all. You look just the same.”
Lura caught her breath and covered her mouth with her hand, then she looked at me, eyes wide. The enchantment of the spring water would end soon. I guessed that it wasn’t vanity that made Lura fear the transformation, but the pain it would cause Quincy to know how long he’d really been away.
“You can both go back to Faerie,” I said. “The passage is still open.” I pointed to the still-swirling water.
Lura and Quincy looked at each other. “I probably wouldn’t know how to live in this world anymore,” he said. “Would you mind?”
“No,” Lura said, “I wouldn’t mind at all. There’s nothing to keep me here, only …” She touched the bag beside her and looked at me.
“I’ll put them in the water,” I told her, “and watch after them.” I recalled that they wouldn’t hatch for one hundred years. “As long as I can, and then I’ll find someone else to watch them.”
Lura gave me a beatific smile of gratitude. She had been beautiful. She was beautiful. She stood and held her hand out to Quincy. He took her hand and stood beside her. They looked as they might have on their wedding day. There were even flowers in Lura’s hair. The yarrow she’d stuck behind her ear had grown into a wreath. And he was wearing a tartan mantle of the same plaid as the shirt he’d worn eighty years ago—the same plaid that Lura had been wearing for eighty years in his memory.
They each said “I love you,” then stepped, hand in hand, into the spiral circle and vanished into the water.
THIRTY
I placed the undine eggs into the pool below the spring, along with the Aelvestone that would nourish them as they grew in the shade of the willow beside a stand of wild irises. I didn’t know what would happen to them in a hundred years if the door was closed, but I couldn’t worry about that now. Every beat of my heart told me that I wasn’t going to let the door close.
I walked toward the door. The sun was rising, the sky pink at the tips of the treetops, the sky above a deep lilac. It was almost dawn. The Grove would be working their spells, but I was confident now that I could stop them. I’d just sent two people to Faerie through a ring of water. As I repeated the words of the heart-binding spell, I felt my power thrumming through my body, from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, cleansing me of the wards. Only one link remained—a rusty broken link snagged in my chest—a nagging ache that was the last lingering grief over losing Liam forever.
I followed the scent of honeysuckle to the dense overgrown thicket. From there, I followed the murmur of voices to a wide circular glade where I found a gathering of townspeople, college faculty, Grove members, and a motley assortment of other creatures. Standing on the edge of the thicket, I noticed that the glade seemed to have widened since I’d last been here. I listened to the creak of intertwined branches above me and had the uneasy feeling that the honeysuckle thicket had widened the glade to accommodate this morning’s gathering—and that the thicket could just as easily tighten the noose again and squeeze us all to death in its grip. Nor was I the only one who seemed to feel that way. The nine members of the Grove stood on the far side of the glade, nervously looking up to the sky as if that might be their only exit. The crowd of townspeople and college faculty appeared, oddly, less anxious. They stood in small groups, talking softly among themselves, saying last good-byes. They were sad and resigned, or angry and indignant, but unafraid. I felt a stirring of pride in their bravery—and a renewed determination to make those farewells unnecessary. We would unmask the Nephilim and then I would open the door and keep it open using the heart-binding spell. But where were Frank and Bill? I looked around for them but didn’t see either man. I caught Liz’s eye and she hurried toward me. I stepped into the glade to greet her—hearing the branches and vines snick closed behind me.
“Callie, there you are! We’d begun to wonder if you were coming.” A fleeting look of hope passed over her strained features.
“I had to see Lorelei,” I said loudly and then, beneath my breath, added, “I have a spell to keep the door open and Frank has a plan to stop the Grove. He’s with my friend Bill. Are they here yet?”
Liz shook her head. She looked around the glade, wringing her hands. “I can’t believe it’s come to this. Perhaps if I had been stricter in whom I let in … but each case was so compelling and I truly believed that diversity made us stronger. Now look at us! What will the college and town do without all these good people?”
I looked around the glade at those we would lose. “We would be weak,” I said, “a shadow of what we are. That’s what the Grove and the creatures they’ve joined are counting on, but I’m not going to let it happen.” I squeezed Liz’s hand and leaned closer to tell her what Frank had told me about the Nephilim, but then there was a loud rustling in the trees above us. Even my grandmother and all the members of the Grove looked up nervously. All except the two blond twins who were striding through the glade, parting the crowd with the same preternatural force I’d witnessed before in Beckwith Hall, coming straight toward me. Angelic-looking, Frank had called the members of the Seraphim Club. These creatures had the features of angels, but there was a cold emanating from them that no one would ever call angelic.
Liz stumbled backward, pushed aside by a disturbance in the air that arrived with the blond twins. I felt it now, too—pulsing gusts that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Then the blond twins turned to flank me and the disturbance was around us. There was a strange vacuum, as if the air had been sucked out of the glade. They each tried to grab one of my arms, but I shook them off and walked toward the rest of the Grove members, who moved aside to reveal an arched doorway in the thicket. The Grove members had been guarding the door—but why? It wasn’t as if anyone here was anxious to get through the door to Faerie. Could they be worried about what might come out of the door?
“You’re late,” my grandmother said by way of greeting.
“I had some things to take care of,” I replied, refusing to sound apologetic. “I see the Stewarts have brought Lorelei,” I added, noticing now the plaid-clad group. The Stewart men stood around her protectively, fierce looks on their broad faces, more like an honor guard at her service than jailors now. She had managed to work her charms on them on the journey through the woods, but at least she hadn’t made a break for it.
“I thought we’d start with her,” Adelaide said. “What are you waiting for? You can open it, can’t you?”
“Of course I can …” I began, but then hesitated. If the Grove was working their spells to close the door why did they need me to open it? “Can’t you open the doo
r?” I asked.
A look of annoyance crossed over Adelaide’s face. “That’s not the kind of magic we do, but if you like we’ll destroy the door before you open it. Your friends will be trapped in this world forever without Aelvesgold—”
“That’s not true,” I said. She looked so startled to be interrupted that she didn’t bother to deny it. I continued in a low voice only she could hear. “Your new friends at the Seraphim Club have all the Aelvesgold you’ll ever need. That’s why you want to close the door, so you’ll have the only source of Aelvesgold in this world. Witches will have to come to you if they want to stay young, and the fey that remain in this world will become your slaves.”
Her lips curled into a faint smile. “And why not? It’s better than witches being the slaves of the fey, as they have been for thousands of years. Join us and you’ll see how powerful you’ll become with an endless supply of Aelvesgold to feed your magic.”
“I don’t need …” I began, but I suddenly thought of the Aelvestone I’d dropped into the spring. The power I’d absorbed from it was still thrumming through my body, but how long would it last if I couldn’t keep the door open? Already I could feel a longing for more of the stuff. Of course I knew where the new Aelvestone lay, but Lorelei’s eggs needed that one to grow. I’d never be desperate enough to take it from them, but would others find it and steal it?
Adelaide’s smile widened. “Go ahead. Open the door and let the good neighbors of Fairwick go back where they belong. Once free of their influence, you’ll see you’ve joined the right side. You owe them nothing. Even your incubus boyfriend has abandoned you.”
The taunt nearly undid me, but, conversely, it steeled my resolve. Liam might not be here now, but he’d saved my life—and so had my friends in Fairwick. Frank was on his way now to destroy the Nephilim. I needed to stall for time.
“I’ll open the door,” I said, “but I won’t let you close it.” I drew the fairy stone from my pocket and saw Adelaide’s eyes widen.
